Note: For citation purposes, a new page number in the text as
originally published in Review of International Studies is indicated
by square brackets and boldface, e.g., "which even its adherents [406]
will acknowledge as ..."

1998 Update

The article has elicited a response by a troika of scholars from Bristol
University - see Carver et al., "Gendering Jones," Review of
International Studies, 24: 2 (1998). I was given 2,500 words to respond
[link now or later to Jones,"Engendering
Debate."(1998)].

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Edited by
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Vanderbilt University Press, 2004

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Introduction

In the last two decades, the classical tradition in international relations(1)
has come under sustained attack on a number of fronts, and from a diverse
range of critics. Most recently, feminist thinkers, following in the footsteps
of neo-Marxists and critical theorists, have denounced IR as "one of the
most gender-blind, indeed crudely patriarchal, of all the institutionalized
forms of contemporary social and political analysis."(2)
Feminists have sought to subvert some of the most basic elements of the
classical paradigm: the assumption of the state as a given; conceptions
of power and "international security"; and the model of a rational human
individual standing apart from the realm of lived experience, manipulating
it to maximize his own self-interest. Denouncing standard epistemological
assumptions and theoretical approaches as inherently "masculinist," feminists,
particularly those from the radical band of the spectrum, have advanced
an alternative vision of international relations: one that redefines power
as "mutual enablement" rather than domination, and offers normative values
of cooperation, care giving, and compromise in place of patriarchal norms
of competition, exploitation, and self-aggrandizement.

At the same time, the feminist critique has subsumed an historical-revisionist
project. Independently of whether they seek to jettison existing theoretical
frameworks, feminists, by definition, reclaim women as subjects
of history, politics, and international relations. The classical conception
of IR, with its emphasis on the state-as-(primary-actor, and its fascination
with the role of the statesman, is prone to being, at the very least,
reworked and supplemented in feminist schemata. The revisionist project
likewise does not spare alternative "progressive" critiques such as neo-Marxist
or global-society theories. Hence, to take one example, dependency theory's
focus on the international division of labour is transformed, in feminist
scholarship, into an arguably more nuanced and holistic picture that analyzes
the division of labour along gender as well as class lines.

But I speak too glibly of "feminist scholarship," "the feminist critique."
In fact, few schools of criticism are as diverse and diffuse as feminism,
which even its adherents will acknowledge as "a fractured and heavily contested
discourse" and "a site of active political struggle."(3)
This diversity carries through to feminist critiques of IR. It results
from the varied philosophical orientations of modern feminism (liberal,
radical, socialist, and so on), and from the recently prominent post-positivist
strand of feminist criticism, which rejects many of the hallowed suppositions
of rationalism and positivism. Theoretical "consistency," ideological cohesion,
the detached observer - all these are called into question by post-positivist
feminists, as by post-positivists more generally.(4)

For the purposes of this discussion, though, three essential features
of feminist theories can be proposed. One has been mentioned: the focus
on women as historical and political actors. A second, and related, essential
feature is an epistemological foundation in the realm of women's experiences.
A normative dimension is also evident in nearly all feminist theorizing.
Its essence is the contention that women and the feminine constitute
historically underprivileged, under-represented, and under-recognized social
groups and "standpoints"; and this should change in the direction of greater
equality. (One would want to allow here for post-positivist feminism
that questions, while perhaps not fully rejecting, the assigning of social-group
status. This school goes further than most in emphasizing the arbitrariness
of gendered femininity and masculinity.)

Thus defined and viewed, I contend that feminism's primary, and seminal,
contribution to the study of international relations is its focus on the
gender variable. In Peterson's summary,

Feminist scholarship, both deconstructive and reconstructive,
takes seriously the following two insights: first, that gender is socially
constructed, producing subjective identities through which we see and know
the world; and second, that the world is pervasively shaped by gendered
meanings. That is, we do not experience or "know" the world as abstract
"humans" but as embodies, gendered beings. As long as that is the case,
accurate understanding of agents - as knowable and as knowers - requires
attention to the effects of our "gendered states."(5)

If this stands as feminism's most important contribution, then it is incumbent
on me to explain why I believe feminist attempts to come to grips with
the gender variable remain limited, even radically constrained. This article
seeks to provide an overview of some major contributions and features of
feminist IR thinking, with particular attention to the problem of war and
peace that has attracted adherents of the classical approach more than
any other. What I take to be the more resonant contributions of feminist
theory are given their due. But with no less "presumptuousness" than feminists
have displayed in invading the hallowed halls of classicism, I also "homestead"
in feminist theory, examining not only constructive contributions, but
also feminism's common missteps and blind spots. The modest contribution
I hope to make to the theorizing of the gender variable occupies the final
section of the article. I call for an expansion of the seminal "discovery"
of feminism - the [407] gender variable in international relations
- by moving beyond feminism's standard equation of gender, an inclusive
designation, with women/femininity, a narrower and more restrictive
on.(6)

This last, central point may be rendered more clearly by utilizing Sapiro's
three-step conceptualization for the incorporation of a gender variable
into social and political analysis:

During the first phase of the development of feminist studies,
gender may become a variable, and women a topic of research, but the models,
methods, language, and theories remain by and large intact ...

In the second phase we learn more directly from women and their
experiences, less mediated by androcentrism. There is more attention to
the gender-specific context of women's lives, to their subjectivity, to
the things they have done and thought and felt that most men may have been
unaware of ...

A third phase takes a shifted frame and looks beyond women.
At this stage we criticize not just particular theories or assumptions
as they have been applied to women, but as they are constructed and apply
in any case ... Our very understanding of the meaning of the political
may change as a result of what we learn through a shifted, gendered focus
... The point is to take gender-informed stances, becoming reflexive
in understanding the role that gender (including that of the observer)
plays.(7)

The feminist project is at least well advanced in the second stage as Sapiro
defines it. But the overall project still seems constrained by feminism's
primary assumptions. "Second-stage" feminism, as Sapiro makes plain, is
grounded in the lived experiences of women. It has so far displayed
only small interest in expanding its purview to permit a more broadly "gender-informed"
stance in international politics and the social sciences more generally.
"Feminists," says Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking, "are partisans
of women."(8) And partisanship and scholarship
do not always mix easily.

To see this more clearly, though, we will need some understanding both
of the diversity of feminist IR and of the core concerns and methodologies
that tend strongly to animate it.

[408]

Avenues of feminist critique

The critique of realist discourse

Feminists are hardly alone in criticizing the vocabulary and epistemological
underpinnings of the classical tradition. Indeed, Walker acknowledges "the
difficulty - and thus undesirability - of distinguishing sharply between
feminist and other forms of contemporary critical enquiry."(9)
Some feminists draw from neo-Marxist scholarship a distrust of core realist
strategies, such as the presentation of states as unitary actors - which
Marxists see as concealing the contradictions in state action, and skating
over the difficulty of defining the state as such. From post-positivism,
other feminists derive a distrust of the classical tradition's most basic
"opposed dualisms": between the unitary state and the international realm
of states; security and insecurity; war and peace; order and anarchy; and,
most fundamentally, discrete subject versus knowable (and assimilable)
object.

What is distinctive about feminism's approach to this critical discourse
is its focus on the gender dimension of classical concepts and strategies.
This also provides the underpinning for feminist critiques of other schools
that, while critical of realist thinking, do not incorporate a gender variable.
Feminist see the classical tradition as an offshoot of, and proselytizing
device for, a political order that subordinates and excludes women. Thus
Tickner's critique of "hegemonic masculinity" contends that "international
politics is such a thoroughly masculinized sphere of activity that women's
voices are considered inauthentic ... The values and assumptions that drive
our contemporary international system are intrinsically related to concepts
of masculinity; privileging these values constrains the options available
to states and their policy-makers."(10)

Prime among the values and assumptions is a "ubiquitous androcentrism"
which posits men's lived experiences as human universals, resulting in
"a systematic bias of codified knowledge and cultural ideologies."(11)
Often a class variable is admitted to the hegemonic arrangement: it is
elite men that are seen as setting the terms of life and discourse
for all - women and non-elite males alike. But while men can be denatured
or physically annihilated within this discourse, their realm and experiences
are nonetheless privileged. It is fair to say that a very common motif,
one that almost deserves inclusion on a list of feminism's defining features,
is of men as an international ruling class, their internal squabbles
secondary to the basic challenge of suppressing women.

The critique of "masculinist" hegemony tends to be launched from two
different founding assumptions within feminism. These can be described
as broadly essentialist versus constructivist orientations,
and a marked shift is evident from the former to the latter as feminist
critiques have grown in number and prominence. Essentialist positions view
the ascriptive traits of feminine and masculine as reflecting primarily
an innate, biologically grounded difference between the sexes. For most
essentialists, a key independent variable is the capacity to bear children.
[409] This is held to orient women towards a nurturing/care-giving
role, one deeply attuned to natural processes and respectful toward the
natural environment. Men, on the other hand, lack the opportunities (and
constraints) that childbearing presents. Thus, they reject the "grounding"
it provides, and view the natural realm instead as an arena for manipulation
and exploitation. In the area of international relations, essentialist
perspectives usually translate to a linking of masculine traits and global
disharmony or conflict. I will consider these views in greater detail in
discussing feminist perspectives on IR's classical preoccupation, the problem
of peace and war.

Constructivist positions, by contrast, make no claims for the centrality
of sex or gender beyond the role that constructed gender values
and identities play in determining priorities and behaviour. For example,
an analytical distinction is often drawn between masculinity and
men. The former gendering may not correspond to the personality
or preferences of most biological men; but as an ideology it rules the
roost, and exerts a profoundly denaturing and distorting influence in human
affairs.

When constructivist leanings combine with post-positivism, the result
is a deep suspicion even of the basic labels of sex and gender. Thus Christine
Sylvester refers to "people called women," "embodied women" as opposed
to constructed femininity. Gender identities, and the "standpoints" they
generate, are always dynamic, always in flux. Sylvester and other post-positivist
feminists are often alive to the threat a "standpoint" perspective poses
to essentialist positions and presumptions.

At a certain point, however, essentialist and constructivist positions
tend to converge - when feminists turn to a critique of the actually
existing social and global order. We have seen that a normative agenda
drives most feminist theory: the conviction that women and the feminine
have always been oppressed and degraded in male-dominant human society.
There is no feminist critic or theorist who does not hope and seek to better
women's lot, materially and existentially.

From this vantage point, IR classicists are often criticized for their
social conservatism, which many feminists see as a reflection of a deeper
masculine fear of woman-as-nature. Hence the realist's positing of a chaotic
"feminine" international environment, the "state of nature," as against
the ordered, rational, "masculine" nation-state. Virtually without exception,
feminist IR theorists strive to illuminate and deconstruct this dichotomy.
All acknowledge that the governing ideologies of world affairs, and the
designation of what is analytically primary versus what is subsidiary,
have been developed and perpetuated by men, or (with a not to post-positivists)
"people called men."

On what specific assumptions and underpinnings of realism have recent
feminist critiques tended to centre? I will take these in turn, proceeding
from realism's epistemological assumptions to some of the more policy-specific
outgrowths of the "realist mindset." Again, it is necessary to bear in
mind that most of these critiques do not originate with feminism, nor are
they unique to it. What is distinctive about the feminist orientation
is the incorporation of the gender variable, and the exploration of its
influence on women and (to a lesser extent) society as a whole.

Opposed dualisms

For the most recent wave of proponents of the so-called reflexive turn
in international relations, no epistemological issue is so central as the
positivist division of experience into discrete knower and objective known.
One has the sense that for post-positivists, scientific rationalism constitutes
a kind of Original [410] Sin from which all other transgressions
- domination, exploitation, subjugation, even annihilation - follow more
or less as a matter of course.(12)

It is worth pointing out the criticisms of realism that seem to derive,
in large part, from the increasingly popular post-positivist feminist stance.
Prime among these is the depiction of realism as inextricably bound up
with a hierarchical world order. This order is, in turn, predicated on
the kind of subject/object distinctions that post-positivists reject. Realists
depict themselves and their craft as adopting a dispassionate, "objective"
critical stance, standing epistemologically outside the world of
international politics, though normatively committed to and engaged with
it.(13) Post-positivist feminists, instead,
see realism as constructed and bolstered by political hierarchies that
generate both rigid conceptual dichotomies and a set of Realpolitik
strategies founded on power and dominance. In these feminist eyes, then,
the realist project is compromised from the start. Claims to scholarly
autonomy and dispassionate observation are untenable. To analyze the world
in realist terms is to perpetuate an unjust status quo.

The distinctively feminist dimension to this critique is a focus on
the extent to which realist discourse perpetuates gender hierarchies along
with hierarchies of class and state. Realism, and classical political theory
in general, do not merely establish binary oppositions. They privilege
one element in the equation over the other. What is male/masculine is standard,
universal, the measure by which everything other is judged. Many
feminists thus isolate a masculinist (more than simply elitist) core to
realism. This reinforces the subjugation of women or, at the very least,
sets the terms on which women will be admitted to social and political
"equality."

If the most influential strands of feminism tend now toward a post-positivist
orientation, this is not to ignore the strong (and once dominant) strain
of feminism that concentrates its efforts on supplementing classical
frameworks by incorporating the gender variable. The liberal-feminist tradition
tends to view existing structures as masculinist by composition, but not
necessarily by definition. It therefore seeks to open up these structures
- political, economic, academic - to female candidates and contributions.
From this viewpoint, epistemological orientations such as empiricism are
seen as innately human, even if their practical and especially public application
has ordinarily been a male preserve. Although, as noted, the prominence
of this liberal perspective has declined in recent years, there are signs
that it may be staging a comeback as some of the more paradoxical or stifling
aspects of post-positivism become evident.

The realist assumption of the state

The classical paradigm places primary emphasis on the world system as a
level of analysis. But the constituent actors in the realist scenario are
states - accepted as givens, "abstract unitary actors whose actions are
explained through laws that can be universalized across time and place
[411] and whose internal characteristics are irrelevant to the operation
of these laws."(14) Tickner contends that
this image of state action is fundamentally "antihumanist" in its reification
of the state. But it is also masculinist in its privileging of traditionally
male-oriented values:

Behind this reification of state practices hide social institutions
that are made and remade by individual actions. In reality, the neorealist
depiction of the state as a unitary actor is grounded in the historical
practices of the Western state system: neorealist characterizations of
state behavior, in terms of self-help, autonomy, and power seeking, privilege
characteristics associated with the Western construction of masculinity.(15)

It is clear why feminists tend to place such emphasis on the realist state-as-actor
formulation. No political phenomenon has been subjected to such radical
scrutiny and criticism in the past twenty years as the state, its composition,
and its perpetuation in the spheres of production and reproduction. Feminism,
as noted, rose to prominence alongside other radical critiques of the 1960s
and '70s. It is hardly surprising, then, that the enduring radical-feminist
tradition, best exemplified by Catharine MacKinnon, has been most insistent
on a re-evaluation of the state from a gender perspective. Radical feminism
charges the domestic political order with negating the female/feminine
and sharply constraining the role and political power of women. When a
class analysis is integrated with the gender variable, as it usually is,
we have a picture of the state as compromised and conflictive, predicated
on the structured inequality of women and the poor (two categories that
intersect to a greater or lesser degree in much feminist analysis, as in
the real world). MacKinnon writes:

The state is male in the feminist sense ... The liberal state
coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interest
of men as a gender - through its legitimating norms, forms, relation to
society, and substantive policies ... Formally, the state is male in
that objectivity is its norm ... It legitimates itself by reflecting
its view of society, a society it helps make by so seeing it, and calling
that view, and that relation, rationality. Since rationality is measured
by point-of-viewlessness, what counts as reason is that which corresponds
to the way things are.(16)

The analysis here stops at the boundaries of the nation-state, but the
implications for feminists of an international system composed of
such units are clear. So, too, is the important difference between such
radical-feminist formulations and radical-Marxist critiques of the state.
While Marxism has spent much of the past two decades exploring the state's
potential to act with "relative autonomy" from dominant social classes,
MacKinnon and other radical feminists reject outright the possibility of
the state ever acting against dominant male/masculine interests.
"However autonomous of class the liberal state may appear, it is not autonomous
of sex. Male power is systemic. Coercive legitimated, and epistemic, it
is the regime."(17)

[412] A number of important feminist voices have rejected the
radical-feminist vision of the liberal state.(18)
But many, perhaps most, feminist IR theorists incorporate a good deal of
the radical-feminist perspective in critiquing classical IR. This is particularly
notable in critiques of classical conceptions of security, dealt with in
more detail later. If the state is permeated to its foundations by gender
bias, it cannot act in a neutral, disinterested, "self-maximizing" manner
to provide security for its citizens. In fact, its very existence is predicated
on the structured insecurity of half its population.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the feminist critique of the
state - one that extends far beyond the boundaries of radical feminism
- is the project to reclaim the private. The history of political
theory from ancient Greece onwards centres, in the minds of many feminists,
on the progressive isolation and devaluation of the "private" sphere (the
household/oikos/domestic unit) where women have traditionally held
sway, and the corresponding inflation of the public, male-dominated realm.
Political thought has tended to define only the latter sphere as "political,"
in the sense of being shaped by active agents and competitive or conflictive
power relations. Feminists - as noted, this is a consensus position - reject
the notion that the realm where women's experiences are most commonly lived
should be marginalized as an analytical concern. Instead, as Susan Moller
Okin and others have persuasively argued, "the personal is political,
and the public/domestic dichotomy is a misleading construct, which obscures
the cyclical pattern of inequalities between men and women." Or, as Peterson
and Runyan put it, with explicit reference to international relations:

Politics itself has to be redefined in view of the wide range
of political activities in which women are highly involved ... Politics
is about differential access to resources - both material and symbolic
- and how such power relations and structures are created, sustained, and
reconfigured. According to the broader definition, politics operates at
all levels, ranging from the family and community to the state and the
international sphere.(19)

The recognition of the importance and politicized nature of the domestic
realm does not automatically lead to a particular set of prescriptions
for conducting politics within or among states. Some feminists view women's
traditional "relegation" to the home as itself a sign of subjugation. Many
others contend that what is required is a revaluation of the domestic
sphere - for example, to break down the distinction in political economy
between productive and reproductive labour. A few argue that the values
and strategies of oikonomia ('economics,' i.e., the management of
the household) can be a vital well-spring of political power for progressive
ends, when proclaimed and enacted publicly.

Whatever the prescriptive dimension, however, the reclamation of the
private has diverse implications for the methodology of the IR discipline.
What if scholars of international political economy standardly factored
in women's contributions in the domestic/reproductive sphere? This would
lead to a restructured vision of human beings' most basic economic processes
and interactions - the material foundation, in international political
economy, of the modern state system. Through the same lens, a gendered
international division of labour (including, for example, the role of [413]
domestic labourers) can be isolated and examined. The imperialist ambitions
that created the modern system of nation-states can be connected to a structuring
of gender relations that assigns men to public roles and invites them to
test and demonstrate their manhood by exploring and conquering other lands.(20)

Feminist explorations of the private sphere may now have driven home
the need to supplement the triumvirate of "levels" guiding classical analysis
of international affairs. Alongside the atomized masculine individual of
liberalism, the unitary state of realism, and the international system
of realism/neo-Marxism, a new avenue of inquiry has been sketched. Its
explanatory potential may be rich, for international relations and political
science more generally.

The rational-actor model

The concept of the rational, self-maximizing actor is usually associated
with liberal economic theory; but in key respects, it has been adopted
by realism to depict unitary state action in the international system.
In particular, realism posits a separate sphere of state activity, analytically
distinguishable from domestic society and, thanks to an anarchic international
environment, not subject to the rule-guided behaviour that directs and
inhibits individuals in society.

Feminist critiques of the rational-actor model tend to centre on the
extent to which the model is constituted by capitalist and patriarchal
strategies: amoral profit maximization, in the case of the first; a focus
on the male-dominated public sphere, in the second. Tickner argues that

individuals and states are socially constituted and ... what counts
as rational action is embodied within a particular society. Since rationality
is associated with profit maximization in capitalist societies, the accepted
definition of rationality has been constructed out of activities related
to the public sphere of the market and thus distinguished from the private
sphere of the household. Feminists argue that, since it is men who have
primarily occupied this public sphere, rationality as we understand it
is tied to a masculine type of reasoning that is abstract and conceptual.
Many women, whose lived experiences have been more closely bound to the
private sphere of care giving and child rearing, would define rationality
as contextual and personal rather than as abstract.(21)

The critique here is similar to one that feminists and others often
deploy against epistemological "objectivity," accusing it of abstracting
the observer to a point of callous detachment from the observed. The realist
world, in Jean Bethke Elshtain's words, is one where "no children are ever
born, and nobody ever dies ... There are states, and they are what is."(22)
Again, the distinctive feminist contribution here is the labelling of Western-style
rationality as a peculiarly male/masculinist phenomenon, reflecting and
perpetuating patriarchal power.

An important supplementary element of the critique centres on the classical
tradition's vision of nature. This issue has assumed paramount significance
with the explosion of concern (again in tandem with the rise of feminism)
over global environmental degradation. The "politics of defining 'natural
resources' as 'there for the taking'" with "no permission required, no
obligations incurred,"(23) is held to be
implicit in realism's approach to power and resource distribution. Once
again, more ecologically-minded feminists differ from other "green" discourses
in identifying [414] the exploiter's mentality as distinctly "masculine."
A responsible, conservationist attitude toward "Mother Earth" is also regularly
posited as feminine, by virtue of women's innate and/or constructed leaning
towards nurturing and care-giving roles.

Realist conceptions of power and security

The spirited discussion in feminist literature of "national security" draws
its inspiration from the debate in peace studies and dependency literature
over peace, war, and violence. The dependista formulation of "structural"
violence(24) has profoundly influenced
the feminist claim that special, gender-specific states of insecurity exist
even - or especially? - in states that are "secure" by realist standards.

A forceful treatment of this theme is Peterson's.(25)
Recapping some statistics of female victimization the world over, Peterson
presents the now familiar motif of a global, male-initiated "war against
women." However "secure" it might be in the international sphere, the state
is complicit in the global phenomenon of violence against women, acting
directly "through its selective sanctioning of non-state violence" and
indirectly "through its promotion of masculinist, heterosexist, and classist
ideologies." In the face of women's "systemic insecurity," Peterson contends
that "'national security' is particularly and profoundly contradictory
for women." She adds:

"Radically rethinking security" is one consequence of taking
feminism seriously: this entails asking what security can mean in the context
of interlocking systems of hierarchy and domination and how gendered identities
and ideologies (re)produce these structural insecurities.(26)

And Tickner notes that "thinking of security in multidimensional terms
allows us to get away from [realists'] prioritizing [of] military issues,
issues that have been central to the agenda of traditional international
relations but that are the furthest removed from women's experiences."(27)

If the idea of national security is compromised by the unjust structures
it acts to buttress, so too is the entire range of classical conceptions
of power. When feminists analyze these conceptions, their argument generally
takes one of two forms. They may seek to illuminate the power relationships
that standard commentary has overlooked; or they may propose a radical
redefinition of what actually constitutes "power."

The former approach is straightforward. With its close link to the binary
demarcation of public and private spheres that feminists have long assailed,
it represents one of the more intuitively valid feminist assertions. The
argument runs as follows: a focus on power exchanges among unitary states,
or among elite men in the public sphere, misses a wide range of power relationships
that discriminate against women. But while classical theories have devoted
extensive attention to power, and downplayed the role of ideological or
cultural factors,

they have under-estimated the amount and varieties of power
at work. It has taken power to deprive women of land titles and leave them
little choice but to sexually service soldiers and banana workers. It has
taken power to keep women out of their countries' diplomatic corps [415]
and out of the upper reaches of the World Bank. It has taken power to keep
questions of inequity between local men and women off the agendas of many
nationalist movements in industrialized as well as agrarian societies.
It has taken power to construct popular culture - films, advertisements,
books, fairs, fashion - which reinforces, not subverts, global hierarchies.(28)

Interestingly, this framework has also been used to examine power relations
among women themselves. Some attention has been devoted to women who hold
gender-structured positions of power - for example, as employers of domestic
servants.(29) Feminists have pointed out
the "very real power relations that exist among women, which determine
how much money and time women can contribute to movement politics (and
movement theorizing)."(30) Opposition has
been voiced to Western feminists' eagerness to address a plight that is
not directly theirs: that of their "underprivileged" sisters in the Third
World. These rifts and dissensions can only grow in the foreseeable future,
as the surface ideological solidarities that tend to prevail early in the
life of progressive movements are undercut by differences latent or emergent
within them.

The second type of feminist project - the attempt to radically redefine
power - is more complex, and to my mind a good deal more problematic. For
one thing, the effort is more prescriptive than descriptive. It seeks to
delineate how power should be viewed, rather than how power considerations
(as ordinarily understood) apply in spheres where their operation has often
gone unnoticed. The attempt to redefine power is usually associated with
feminism's essentialist wing, which isolates supposed differences in the
way women versus men employ power. Women are said to act in a "shared rather
than assertive" manner.(31) Feminist attempts
to "conceptualiz[e] power as mutual enablement rather than domination"
seek to strip power of its coercive dimension, as a means of "feminizing"
both the domestic and international environment. This is the distinction
drawn by Marilyn French (Beyond Power), who argued for a separation
of "power-over" from "power-to." In Rosemarie Tong's summary, "Whereas
power-to is constructive, power-over is destructive. Power-to seeks to
create and to further pleasure for everyone; power-over seeks to destroy
and spread pain."(32)

Feminism and realism: some concluding
comments

I do not wish to suggest that all feminists view realism and a feminist
approach to IR as utterly incompatible. One element of the ongoing debate
between liberal feminists and their post-positivist counterparts is the
occasional recognition that, as [416] with other "patriarchal" paradigms
or institutions, realism may not be so deeply compromised as to require
jettisoning.

In her appraisal of Hans J. Morgenthau, for instance, Tickner criticizes
realism as only "a partial description of international politics," owing
to its deeply embedded masculinist bias.(33)
But partial descriptions are partial descriptions; they are not
dead wrong. Tickner attacks Morgenthau's paradigm on several grounds. But
her main concern is to offer a "feminist reformulation" of certain
realist principles. In a similar vein, the central problem may not be with
objectivity as such, but with objectivity "as it is culturally defined
... [and] associated with masculinity." The idea of the "national interest"
likewise needs to be rendered more "multidimensional and contextually contingent,"
but not necessarily abandoned. Tickner stresses: "I am not denying the
validity of Morgenthau's work,"(34) just
as Kathy Ferguson emphasizes the importance of "negotiat[ing] respectfully
with contentious others."(35)

A similar approach is evident in Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches
and Bases, perhaps the best-known work of feminist IR criticism. Enloe
attempts to supplement the classical framework by considering women's contributions
and experiences. But she does not devalue or reject the framework as such.
Thus, Enloe looks at international diplomacy, geostrategic military alliances
(as symbolized by military bases), international tourism, and First World
- Third World economic relations. The first two are hallmark concerns of
the classical paradigm. The third and fourth derive from neo-Marxist and
IPE theories. In each case, Enloe presents innovative avenues of inquiry,
and an intriguing reworking of perspectives that have grown stale. Her
study of international diplomacy, for example, concentrates on the role
of diplomatic wives in structuring the "informal relationships" that enable
male diplomats "to accomplish their political tasks."(36)
Women, she argues, are "vital to creating and maintaining trust between
men in a hostile world";(37) "negotiations
'man-to-man' are most likely to go smoothly if they can take place outside
official settings, in the 'private' sphere of the home or at gatherings
that include wives."(38) But Enloe does
not seem to be proposing a revision of what constitutes "the business
of international politics," however critical she may be of the way this
business operates, or of the (underacknowledged) supporting roles women
play in the business.

Scholars have always mined the past for insights and guidance. There
is a curiosity, a generosity of spirit, in much feminist writing that may
facilitate a provisional modus vivendi, though hardly an alliance,
between realist and feminist scholarship. This would demand of the classical
tradition that it acknowledge and correct its blank spaces and biased formulations.
Feminism, meanwhile, could glean from realism some sharp insights into
the limited but significant veins of international politics that the classical
tradition has long mines, and not without success.

[417] Rather less of a cause for optimism is the hollow claim
by some feminist IR scholars that they are constructing a radically new
theorizing of international relations, and a research agenda to guide the
project. In my view, it is the post-positivist line of analysis that exhibits
the widest disparity between stated ambition and substantive contribution.
Given this strand's recent prominence, it is worth considering the claims
of one of its major exponents in some detail.

Christine Sylvester's 1994 work Feminist Theory and International
Relationsin a Postmodern Era angrily rejects the notion that
feminist theory ought to be playing essentially a supplementary role. Criticizing
Robert Keohane for proposing something along these lines, Sylvester writes:

Explicit in this analysis is yet another support assignment
for "women." We who are feminists in the academy are urged to come out
of our vague and homeless positions in IR in order to provide something
that the mainsteam [sic] needs and cannot think through and provide
using its own powers of reflection ... There is, in this admonition, little
sense that feminists can set an agenda for ourselves and for IR and really
no sense that we may want to interface differently and rewrite-repaint-recook
the field rather than join it.(39)

But the specifics of the "re-visioning," in Sylvester's formulation, seem
meagre. "It would be refreshing to see a recreation of the Cuban Missile
Crisis from the situated standpoint of John McCone's wife," Sylvester writes,
because she "experienced, and perhaps even influenced, the first round
of the bureaucratic politics game."(40)
This is the sole concrete example of a feminist-influenced research agenda
that Sylvester advances in a chapter-long discussion of the "second debate"
in IR theory. Perhaps such an inquiry would be refreshing, but there
is frankly little to indicate that it would be revelatory. And there is
no evidence so far that investigations of this type could lead to a radically
new theorizing of IR. One would expect, instead, more in the way of historical
footnotes. Sylvester's more detailed attempts to "move beyond analysis
by metaphor" and "repaint the canvases of IR" similarly bog down in movements,
settings, and phenomena - the Greenham Common women and Zimbabwean agricultural
cooperatives - which strike this writer as marginal, if that word still
retains its pejorative connotations.(41)

War, peace and feminism

It is easy to see why the problem of peace and war has preoccupied so many
feminist critics of international relations. For one thing, this is the
main concern of classical IR theory. Feminist critiques of Realism, particularly
Realist approaches to the exercise of power and the bolstering of national
security, naturally must attend to the classical tradition's conceptualizations
of conflict and prescriptions for peace.

Second, key strands of feminism draw on neo-Marxist approaches in manifesting
a strong concern with social justice and human emancipation. Marxists have
traditionally given primacy to justice over peace: they defend the right
of subjugated [418] populations to effect social change, by violent
means if necessary. But peace is doubly problematic for feminist
approaches. It brings into play a diversity of debates over the centrality
of gender, in particular the link between masculinity and militarism.

Can women, or at least "femininity," be equated with pacifism? Is this
equation a conceptual or merely a historical one? Put another way: can
one establish "a straightforward equation in which women equal peace and
men equal war"?(42) Or does women's traditional
removal from the military sphere merely reflect their historical subjugation
and consignment to the private sphere? If women equal peace and men war,
then we are again looking at a project to feminize the political. But if
these associations are more constructed than innate, then the dichotomy
(man-as-militarist, woman-as-care-giver) simply reflects stereotypical
patterning of the kind that has always inhibited the expression of women's
full potential and personality.

The most common motif in feminist analyses of peace and war depicts
masculinity as a transcendentally aggressive force in society and history.
Women are bystanders or victims of men's wars. Most feminist commentary,
through to the 1980s, followed this framework. In particular, the extraordinary
outburst of concern over the nuclear threat in the 1970s and early '80s
resulted in a spate of feminist writings explicitly or implicitly founded
on a critique of masculinist militarism. The zenith of this genre came
with the 1984 publication of Dr Helen Caldicott's Missile Envy,
which denounced the arms race in pop-Freudian terms.(43)
The underlying philosophy is well exemplified by Barbara Zanotti's 1982
"Patriarchy: A State of War." Zanotti asked:

Why weren't we prepared for this? - the imminence of nuclear
holocaust; the final silencing of life; the brutal extinction of the planet
... We have lived with violence so long. We have lived under the rule of
the fathers so long. Violence and patriarchy: mirror images. An ethic
of destruction as normative. Diminished love of life, a numbing to
real events as the final consequence. We are not even prepared ... Wars
are nothing short of rituals of organized killing presided over by men
deemed "the best." The fact is - they are. They have absorbed in the most
complete way the violent character of their own ethos.

Women, in this conception, are uniquely able to perceive the scale of masculine
folly. They are likewise well positioned to offer a set of distinctively
feminine values to halt the slide towards war:

Women know and feel the lies that maintain nuclear technology
because we have been lied to before. We are the victims of patriarchal
lies ... To end the state of war, to halt the momentum toward death, passion
for life must flourish. Women are the bearers of lifeloving energy. Ours
is the task of deepening that passion for life and separating from all
that threatens life, all that diminishes life; becoming who we are as women.(44)

[419] This standard essentialist formulation was roundly challenged
in 1987 with the publication of Jean Betake Elshtain's Women and War.
Elshtain's treatise - part autobiography, part revisionist cultural history,
party feminist self-critique - appears decisively to have recast the terms
of debate among feminist analysts of peace and war.

Examining the traditional image of women and war, Elshtain declared:
"There are sanctimonies to deconstruct, amnesia to life, stories to remember."(45)
Among these, she cited the inconvenient fact that pacifist women "are greatly
outnumbered by the majority of their gender who do not enter into pacifist
construals as a chosen identification; indeed women in overwhelming numbers
have supported their state's wars in the modern West."(46)
Elshtain's paradigmatic instance of female complicity in "men's wars" is
the outbreak of World War I, when the powerful suffragist movement in Britain
and North America rushed to throw its weight behind the Allied war effort
- roaming the streets distributing white feathers, symbols of cowardice,
to young men out of uniform.(47) In a later
work, Elshtain points to "hundreds of hair-raising tales of bellicose mothers,
wives, and girlfriends writing the combat soldier and requesting the sacrifice
of the enemy as a tribute, or gift, to her."(48)

Elshtain's contention is that women and men alike have been constructed
to play roles in war: the Just Warrior versus the Beautiful Soul. She finds
many of these ancient stereotypes deeply embedded in modern feminist discourse.
To counter the trend, she offers a set of analytic devices useful in "investigating
whether Beautiful Soul constructions are being shored up or displaced":

(1) Does the author define all women in opposition to all men?
(2) Do the author's rhetorical choices invite self-congratulatory responses
and lend themselves to sentimentalist reactions? (3) Does the author open
or foreclose space for debate and disagreement? ... (4) Does the author
compel us to think in the absence of certainty or ensure certainty at the
cost of critical reflection? (5) Do the author's formulations reassure,
soothe, bring relief to, reinforce, reaffirm; or do they disturb,
unsettle, take apart, make ambiguous? (6) Is the author's voice didactic,
ironic, moralistic?(49)

Elshtain's work has encouraged the advent of a more self-critical, sceptical
stance in feminist analyses of peace and war. In particular, feminist commentary
of the last few years seems more preoccupied than previously with the archetypes
Elshtain isolates. Feminists increasingly have sought to ensure that these
stereotypes are not subtly manifested in their own thinking and writing.
Thus Burguieres, in her overview of "Feminist Approaches to Peace," finds
some feminist analyses contaminated by "assertions ... unsubstantiated
by history or thoughtful analysis."(50)
Her solution is not to abandon the search for a feminist conceptualization
of peace and war. Indeed, she adheres to the notion that the "much deeper
roots" of militarism reside "in gender relations."(51)
But she rejects "assertions such as 'patriarchies are based on militarism'
or 'women are peaceful, men violent.'" Her vision of a feminist peace [420]
project emphasizes the responsibility both men and women have to restrain
the drive to war: "Women have no superior moral claim to being bearers
of peace."(52)

The evolution of feminist perspectives on peace and war - and one does
sense a cumulation, a gradual increase in the sensitivity and sophistication
of the analysis - parallels the growth of feminism as a social movement.
I have stressed at various points how inextricable is feminism's women-oriented
"standpoint" from its wider normative-social project. A reflexive response,
when one's contributions are systematically suppressed, is to proclaim
not just the value but the superiority of one's orientation and
actions. If disempowerment can give rise to moral hubris of this type,
then the transformation in feminist thinking on peace and war may likewise
reflect the increased power of women worldwide, and the new prominence
of feminist formulations in academic and public debate. A more stable podium,
it appears, encourages a more nuanced and ironic analysis.

Towards an international politics of gender

I have suggested that the most important, and surely a lasting, contribution
of feminist critiques has been to add a gender dimension to analyses of
international relations. Few scholars will be able, in future, to analyze
international divisions of labour, or peace movements, or (pace
Enloe) the activities of international diplomats, without attending to
feminist perspectives on all these phenomena.

But feminists' success in exploring the gender variable remains, at
this point, mixed. And until feminist frameworks are expanded and to some
extent reworked, it is hard to see how a persuasive theory or account of
the gendering of international relations can be constructed.

Feminist attempts to incorporate a gender variable into IR analysis
are constrained by the basic feminist methodology and all feminists' normative
commitments. A genuinely "feminist approach" by definition "must take women's
lives as the epistemological starting point."(53)
And a defining element of feminist approaches, as noted earlier, is a social
project aimed at ameliorating women's structured lack of privilege and
emancipating them as a gender-class.

The result is a de facto equating of gender primarily with females/femininity.
It is, in its way, a new logocentrism, whereby (elite) male actions and
(hegemonic) masculinity are drawn into the narrative mainly as independent
variables explaining [421] "gender" oppression. Even those works
that have adopted the most inclusive approach to gender, such as Peterson
and Runyan's Global Gender Issues, betray this leaning. Peterson
and Runyan do acknowledge that "our attention to gender ... tends to underplay
the considerable differences among men and among women,"
and note that "it is not only females but males as well who suffer from
rigid gender roles."(54) For the most part
in their analysis, though, "gender issues" are presented as coequal with
women's issues. The plight of embodied women is front and centre throughout,
while the attention paid to the male/masculine realm amounts to little
more than lip-service.

Very occasionally, one comes across a work - I think of Elshtain's Women
and War - that explores the ambiguities of gender construction, and
the diversity of women and men's lived experiences, in a balanced manner.
But work that is more easily slotted into the category of IR critique tends
to display a disconcerting fuzziness when it comes to analyzing the life
situation of women and men alike.

Take Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases, which is more adept
than most at examining the impact of gender on embodied women and men.
Enloe points to the "differences in the politics of masculinity between
countries - and between ethnic groups in the same country."(55)
Later, she argues:

Frequently the reason behind government officials - usually
men - trying to control women has been their need to optimize the control
of men: men as migrant workers, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence operatives,
overseas plantation and factory managers, men as bankers.(56)

All but the first two of these categories, however, refer to patterns of
gender that favour some men by guiding them into positions of material
and political privilege - positions that by their nature exclude the vast
majority of men, with whatever versions of constructed masculinity they
bear. (Even Enloe's category of "soldier" is ambiguous, given military
hierarchy.) Thus, as in most feminist commentary, "the politics of masculinity"
for Enloe centres on how male privilege is established and how
it is used to perpetuate the subordination of women. Attention to the
large mass of ordinary men in international society is not absent in Enloe's
work (as it is in most feminist writing); but it seems disconcertingly
permeated by the male-as-power-broker stereotype.

For further evidence of this failing, take Enloe's depiction of the
role of women in providing mistress-style support for male plantation workers
in Central America:

having young male workers without wives and children has an
advantage: the men are in their physical prime, they are likely to view
life as an adventure and be willing to tolerate harsh working and living
conditions.(57)

No evidence is offered as to how many males working sixteen-hour shifts
in the cane fields actually "view life as an adventure," nor about what
structural conditions might induce them to "tolerate [their] harsh working
and living conditions." Elsewhere, Enloe discusses a horrific fire at a
dormitory for women seamsters in Korea, and comments: "[Korea's] making
it as a 'world class' player has come with a [422] gendered price
tag."(58) The implication is that the gendering
of the international division of labour forces women disproportionately
to shoulder the burden of physical risk and unsafe working conditions.
No evidence is presented that this is the case. Dependable statistics might
be difficult to find, but it is at least possible that the First World
pattern of overwhelming male victimization in this area is transferred,
no doubt in more muted form, to the developing world.(59)

A methodology predicated on illuminating women's experiences is useful,
and it may be justified in isolation if this redresses a traditional focus
on the role of men. But I think it is fair to say that the gender dimension
of many of these phenomena, and others sketched below, has never
received systematic attention in the literature of IR or, for that matter,
comparative politics. There would seem to be grounds for a more far-reaching
application of core feminist methodologies, one that would isolate the
gender variable but not leap so readily to the tacit equation of gender
issues with women's issues.

To buttress these contentions, consider Mary Ann Tetrault's analysis
of the "private" sphere, which I have suggested may deserve consideration
as a new "level of analysis" for IR theorists. Tetrault writes that "the
bourgeois family also contributed to personal autonomy for men." How the
standard pattern of subordinate wage-labour for all but a narrow elite
of Western males might promote "autonomy" for an entire gender is not explained.
She adds: "the pattern of increased male autonomy and independence from
family obligations continues," as though wage-labour, ordinarily aimed
at earning a wage to support a family, constituted "independence
from family obligations." Finally, "the burdens of failure are carried
primarily by the family, and often disproportionately by the mother." How
often? Disproportionately often? The answer is quite possibly yes,
but Tetrault's claims are only asserted, never effectively argued.(60)
(In a similar vein, note Tickner's comment that "women have entered the
military primarily in the lower ranks," meant to point out the extent to
which the upper realms remain masculinized. But how else does one
enter the military, except at the lower levels?(61))

The question of personal security as an integral component of "national"
security also appears to deserve much more balanced evaluation. Tickner's
call for "attention ... to gender issues [and] to women's particular needs
with respect to security"(62) resurrects
the too-typical equation of gender issues with women's particular needs.
How particular are those needs? The question is evaded in Tickner's formulation:

Feminists call attention to the particular vulnerabilities
of women within states, vulnerabilities that grow out of hierarchical gender
relations that are also interrelated with international politics ... In
militarized societies women are particularly vulnerable to rape, and evidence
suggests that domestic violence is higher in military families or in families
that include men with prior military service. Even though most public violence
is committed by men against other men, it is more often women who feel
threatened in public places.(63)

The phrase "particular vulnerabilities" suggests not just an analytically
separable category, but a disproportionate degree of vulnerability. This
is then conflated with perceived vulnerability ("women ... feel
threatened" - even though men are more often the real-life victims of public
violence). Tickner's strategy explicitly subordinates the patterns of actual
vulnerability, which arguably would be more important in arriving at a
normatively grounded reading of gendered security.

The self-imposed limitations on most feminist IR discourse are apparent,
too, in Christine Sylvester's assertion that "states and their regimes
connect with people called women only to ensure, tacitly at least, that
the benefits of regime participation will flow from 'women' to 'men' and
not ever the other way round."(64)
This is an image of hegemonic gender-class that is impervious to nuance
or paradox. It is a striking bit of absolutist phrasing from one of the
field's leading post-positivist theorists, who elsewhere, rhetorically
at least, emphasizes flexibility and empathy.(65)
And it leads, or ought to lead, to some hard questions. If masculine privilege
is so all-pervasive and absolute, we must ask (in a developed-world context
at least) why it is that men live substantially shorter lives than women,
kill themselves at rates vastly higher than women, absorb close to one
hundred per cent of the fatal casualties of society's productive labour,
and direct the majority of their violence against "their own" ranks. All
these features appear to be anomalous if not unique in the history of ruling
classes the world over. They surely deserve more sustained, non-dogmatic
attention than Sylvester, along with every feminist theorist I have encountered,
grants them.(66) "It is not valid and reliable,"
as Sylvester herself reminds us, "to build generalizable models ... on
a partial base."(67) If the feminist approach
to gendered "security" is to be taken seriously, as it deserves to be,
these powerfully gendered phenomena deserve closer investigation than feminist
commentary so far has been able or willing to provide.

As a contribution to the basic project called for here - that is, more
balanced and fertile theories of the gender variable's operation in international
relations - I conclude by suggesting a range of phenomena and issue areas
that ought to be [424] explored. My suggestions are feminist-grounded
in that they seek to apply a core feminist methodology - isolation of the
gender dimension of an issue or phenomenon. But they move beyond presently
existing feminist approaches by directing the analytical beam equally towards
the gender that is, so far by definition, under-represented in feminist
commentary.

By itself, this survey is no less partial than most feminist gender-mappings.
But it is a necessary first step towards synthesis: a blending of gendered
perspectives that will allow the gender variable and its operations to
be examined in more multi-dimensional terms. There is, of course, no space
here to enter into detailed discussion of each phenomenon and issue. I
buttress certain points with case-studies and statistical data, but the
sketch appeals as much to intuition and common sense.

This closing discussion builds itself around issue-areas and phenomena
that could help generate real-world research agendas. I think the limited
space available is best devoted to concrete matters, as opposed to more
abstract investigations into the construction of gender, the continuum
of gender identities, and so on. Attention to real-world issues allows
the theorist of gender and IR to benefit from an important underpinning
of feminist critiques: their normative concern for, and engagement with,
the embodied subjects of the analysis. We need more narratives, more details,
more case-studies that help humanize the research subjects and assist the
reader in understanding how gender shapes their destinies, or their plight.

Let us begin by briefly recapping several themes and issue-areas that
have been touched on only in passing. Few would deny (though relatively
few feminist IR theorists have adequately explored) the manner in which
military "service" is gender-structured. A number of issues related to
war and military service warrant closer examination. Among them are: the
issue and practice of conscription; prisoners of war; under-age troops;
"civil defence patrols" in societies riven by civil war; mutiny and desertion;
and post-battle trauma. Feminist writings on international relations to
this point have devoted only limited and partial attention to the masculine
gendering of these phenomena. This is inevitable so long as analysis is
limited to "military and industrial practices that impoverish and/or endanger
the lives of women and their families."(68)
That may be enough for a narrowly feminist perspective; it is not sufficient
for an overarching theorizing of gender.

Consider, in this context, the most recent book by Cynthia Enloe, The
Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, which explores
the militarization of masculinity with greater analytical range than any
feminist IR commentary since Elshtain's Women and War. Enloe devotes
a substantial section of her work to an examination of "The Gendered Gulf"
- that is, the gender dimension of the Gulf War and its aftermath. She
writes movingly of the plight of Asian female domestic servants in Kuwait
during and after the war; of rape and other abuses of Kuwaiti women by
Iraqi soldiers, and of US women soldiers by their own officers.

But there is a gender gulf in Enloe's reading of the gendered Gulf.
Her normative commitment to unveiling "the conditions of women's lives"(69)
ignores other aspects of the gendering process in the Gulf War that, by
any strictly quantitative measure, far outweigh the female-grounded examples
she settles on. Where, for example, is mention of arguably the most explicitly
gender-selective policy decision of the entire [425] Gulf War? I
refer to Saddam Hussein's decision on 28 August 1990 to release all women
and children among those hostages seized on 17 August, together with selected
men, while retaining "about 8,000 men ... hundreds [of them] in their 50's
and 60's, and some ... ill." (So The New York times reported, under
an unintentionally comic headline: "Who Can Leave Iraq? A Matter of Randomness
and Ethnicity."(70))

Likewise, the real-world gendering of the refugee flow, one of the largest
in history, that the Gulf War produced never impinges on Enloe's analysis.
In many cases, migrant workers accounted for most of the exodus. Enloe
is amply aware of the role of female migrant labour in Kuwait, the
domestic servants from the Philippines and elsewhere. Is this the only,
or the most significant, gendering of migrant labour in the Gulf, and the
refugee flow that attached to it? One million Yemenis, 700,000 Egyptians,
and 250,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the region during the
war, along with 350,000 Asians. Many of this last group were from Pakistan,
where, in some impoverished regions, "two out of every three poor households
... has [sic] workers in the Middle East." These are exclusively
male workers, as Shahid Burki's research makes clear.(71)
Indeed, one would expect men to make up a majority or an overwhelming majority
of the migrant workers who flocked to work in the Gulf's oil economy, regional
construction industry, and professional infrastructure. But a fuller exploration
of the migrant-refugee issue would not necessarily turn up information
relevant to a feminist, like Enloe, whose primary preoccupation is with
the experiences of embodied women rather than gendered women and men alike.(72)

The gendering of the large-scale atrocities committed by Saddam's forces
in Kuwait also receives only selective attention in Enloe's work. She touches
on the plight of Kuwaiti and foreign women abused by Iraqi troops, but
the wider Iraqi process of detention, torture, execution, and forced removal
(probably for execution) of tens of thousands of Kuwaitis - again, judging
from human-rights and media [426] reports, virtually all male -
is passed over. Likewise, the Iraqi regime's postwar assault against the
Shia "marsh Arabs" in southern Iraq seems to have been highly gender-specific.
"The troops are arresting all males over 15 and taking them to Radwaniyeh
[prison camp]," according to a Middle East Watch researcher. "They're never
seen again," and thousands are estimated to have died, often after horrific
torture.(73)

We have noted that feminist explorations of the "private" sphere and
"security" issues have prompted a concern with society-level issues of
gendered violence and conflict. Certain types of violence, though, notably
murder and suicide, deserve different gender-sensitive investigation. For
example, in the country with by far the highest homicide rate in the world,
Colombia, 88.2 per cent of victims are male. Patterns of murder and suicide
elsewhere also appear to be disproportionately weighted against males.(74)
The more amorphous issue of health and life expectancy might also be examined
under this rubric. It would be central, for instance, to any understanding
of the gendered social impact of political transition processes. Can any
generalizations be drawn from the calamitous decline in male life expectancy
in the former Soviet Union? Why has it occurred in the midst of political
transformations that have ordinarily been viewed as disproportionately
harming women?(75)

Patterns of political violence also need to be explored for the
light they might shed on how "security" is gendered at the societal level.
Preliminary investigation suggests that political violence by state agencies
is predominantly, even overwhelmingly, [427] directed against males
rather than females. To cite three examples from the author's own area
of primary interest: a survey commissioned by the revolutionary Sandinista
government after the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua found that 93.4 per cent
of those killed in the insurrection were male, a "predominance ... [that]
is impressive," according to Carlos Vilas.(76)
Marysa Navarro's study of state terror in Argentina during the era of the
Dirty War found that 70 per cent of those killed or "disappeared" were
male.(77) A recent report on state terrorism
(along with guerrilla and death-squad violence) in the Colombian banana-growing
region of Urabá explicitly notes the combatants' readiness to "wage
their escalating war by killing male civilians instead of each other."
"[A]n estimated 677 men ... have been killed so far this year," mostly
unarmed banana workers; "In this macho society, women are protected and
only the men are murdered, leaving about a thousand widows in the region,"
according to Church estimates.(78)

Sub-categories of state violence would include: torture; gender-selective
punitive action (for instance, the rounding up by state authorities of
young males, deemed suspicious or potentially subversive as a group);
and state violence against street children, in Brazil and elsewhere, along
with the phenomenon of child and adult homelessness itself.(79)
One wonders, for instance, whether Christine Sylvester would employ the
metaphor of "homelessness" (as a desirable and "creative" post-positivist
standpoint) quite so readily, were the real-life phenomenon gendered to
the comparative detriment of women. "Homelessness of all types is frightening
to contemplate from a perspective of privilege" - indeed.(80)

It is possible that incarceration and imprisonment should also be examined
as sub-components of state violence. Intuition and casual observation suggest
that the vast majority of the world's incarcerated are male. This is a
reality that I, for one, have found difficult to reconcile with the radical-feminist
interpretation of legal systems as instruments of "male" hegemony, unless
the fissures in patriarchy are made central to our understanding of it
and our normative engagement with it. As with military conscription,
one would need to be attuned to the societal "ripple [428] effects"
of prolonged incarceration, and to the epidemic of sexual violence against
males that often seems to accompany it.(81)[Link to the award-winningStop
Prisoner RapeWebsite.]

Attention could usefully be devoted to another subset of political violence:
inter-tribal and inter-ethnic conflict, the explicitly violent component
of which often seems to break down along gender lines. The systematic mass
rape, mostly of Bosnian and Croatian women, in the Balkans war has become
a feminist cause célèbre(82)
(it is explored in detail in Enloe's The Morning After); but this
is only the most fragmentary reading of the gendering of this conflict
- a deficiency I have explored, and sought to redress, in detail elsewhere.(83)[Link to the full text ofGender and
Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia.]For another instance
of the normally overlooked gendering of ethnic violence, take the report
by Indian feminist Madhu Kishwar on the 1984 anti-Sikh rioting in New Delhi
following the assassination of Indira Gandhi:

The nature of the attacks confirm [sic] that there was
a deliberate plan to kill as many Sikh men as possible, hence nothing was
left to chance. That also explains why in almost all cases, after hitting
or stabbing, the victims were doused with kerosene or petrol and burnt,
so as to leave no possibility of their surviving. Between October 31 and
November 4, more than 2,500 men were murdered in different parts of Delhi,
according to several careful unofficial estimates. There have been very
few cases of women being killed except when they got trapped in houses
which were set on fire. Almost all the women interviewed described how
men and young boys were special targets. They were dragged out of the houses,
attacked with stones and rods, and set on fire ... When women tried to
protect the men of their families, they were given a few blows and were
forcibly separated from the men. Even when they clung to the men, trying
to save them, they were hardly ever attacked the way men were. I have not
yet heard of a case of a woman being assaulted and then burnt to death
by the mob.(84)

This, one of the bloodiest gender-specific and gender-selective massacres
in our century, has passed unnoticed in feminist narratives of societal
security, to my knowledge.

Finally, in the sphere of international political economy, one might
examine more closely the gendering of child labour and child slavery; the
operations of the informal or black market, along with the international
traffic in narcotics; and in particular the range of physical hazards associated
with labour in both productive and reproductive spheres. As mentioned earlier,
patterns of international migratory labour also seem to be highly gender-structured
- but only the female component has received sustained gender-sensitive
analysis.

[429] It could be argued that the above list, tentative and scattered
as it is, needlessly draws in phenomena that have no obvious relationship
to international relations. But surely the contributions of feminists and
other critics of the classical paradigm render us more cautious of drawing
neat distinctions between, say, the security one has or feels in daily
life and the "security" or "stability" of the state or the international
"order." A rigid division of analytical levels may be useful or necessary
in the context of a given project, but it can also mask important commonalities
and connections.

I have tried here to shed some light on subjects, patterns, and issue-areas
that have "fallen through the gaps" of feminist IR analysis. I hope the
contribution, though preliminary, is constructive. It reflects my conviction
that, regardless of whether the gender variable, even inclusively approached,
"make[s] the world go round," its potential explanatory power is considerable.
Feminist readings of IR, with their wealth of new perspectives and analytical
insights, have laid an indispensable foundation for future evaluations
of the gender variable. Foundational or not, though, these same critiques
are far from constituting an adequate account or even an inclusive framing
of gender and IR. The wider task - theorizing and narrating the international
politics of gender - remains.

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Notes

1. I follow Holsti's use of the term "classical tradition"
to refer to the broad Realist and neo-Realist paradigm: Holsti, The
Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory
(Winchester, MA, 1987).

4. I use the term "post-positivist" to encompass
a wide variety of theories that have in common an emphasis on the social
construction of knowledge, history, gender. By these lights, "all knowledge
is socially constructed and is grounded in the time, place, and social
context of the investigator," as J. Ann Tickner writes in Gender in
International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
(New York, 1992), p. 21.

6. Hence the quotation marks around "gender" in the
title of this essay, which is drawn from the heading to ch. 1 of Cynthia
Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics (London, 1989). On a personal note, readers of an earlier
version of this article faulted me for failing to situate myself properly
in the discussion. Let me first situate myself as someone who does not
fully share the current obsession with self-situation. I am disturbed by
assertions that one can look little further than the tip of one's gender,
race, class, or sexual orientation and, indeed, that it is politically
suspect and invasive to seek to do so. Beyond this, I have found that the
demand to divulge "where I'm coming from" in analyzing feminist critiques
often amounts to a test of loyalty-by-group-affiliation. This holds little
appeal for someone who belongs to most of the "wrong" groups (male, white,
western, etc.). It also goes against the grain of my left-individualist
political leanings. Philosophically, if I am suspicious of perceived excesses
in "relational" thinking, my lifelong affection for social anarchism (of
the Giovanni Baldelli variety) does render me susceptible to the charms
of post-positivist playfulness, insolence and rebelliousness.

7. Virginia Sapiro, "Gender Politics, Gendered Politics:
The State of the Field," in William Crotty (ed.), Political Science:
Looking to the Future, vol. 1: The Theory and Practice of Political Science
(Evanston, IL, 1991), p. 166.

12. In this vein, see V. Spike Peterson, "Transgressing
Boundaries: Theories of Knowledge, Gender and International Relations,"
Millennium, 21: 2 (1992). "What critiques of positivism require
is a shift from oppositional to relational thinking. This insight is obscured
by binary logic that precludes the possibility of understanding a critique
of 'A' as entailing anything other than 'not-A.' ... [In fact,] contrasting
but non-oppositional terms may be related along multiple dimensions and
their non-binary structure permits more than two possibilities" (p. 188).

13. By "normative engagement" I mean realism's traditional
concern with the problem of peace and war.

14. Tickner, Gender in International Relations,
p. 42.

15. Ibid.

16. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward A Feminist
Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 163. Note the strong
echoes of post-positivist feminism's rejection of empiricism/objectivity,
given a feminist tinge through definition of "this epistemological stance"
as male at its roots. Radical feminism and post-positivist feminism regularly
overlap in this manner.

17. Ibid., p. 170.

18. See, e.g., Mona Harrington, "What Exactly Is
Wrong with the Liberal State as an Agent of Change?," in Peterson (ed.),
Gendered States.

24. "Structural violence" is defined by Tickner
as "the economic insecurity of individuals whose life expectancy was reduced,
not by the direct violence of war but by domestic and international structures
of political and economic oppression." Tickner, Gender in International
Relations, p. 69.

31. Tickner, Gender in International Relations,
p. 65, citing the work of David McClelland.

32. Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive
Introduction (Boulder, CO, & San Francisco, 1989), p. 101. See
also Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, pp. 79-80. It could
be argued, of course, that a similar emphasis on "enabling" rather than
"dominating" power strategies is a hallmark of institutional liberals like
Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. See their Power and Interdependence:
World Politics in Transition (Boston, MA, 1977).

33. J. Ann Tickner, "Hans Morgenthau's Principles
of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation," Millennium 17:
3 (1988), p. 431. Tickner's piece and other articles from this special
issue of Millennium were subsequently published in book form: Rebecca
Grant and Kathleen Newland (eds.), Gender and International Relations
(Buckingham, 1991). They first came to my attention as journal articles,
however, and I have referenced them accordingly.

43. Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race
and Nuclear War (New York, 1985), especially the penultimate chapter,
"Etiology: Missile Envy and Other Psychopathology." On the link between
masculinism and nuclear militarism, see also Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death
in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals," Signs, 12: 4 (1987).

44. Both passages cited in Elshtain, Women and
War, pp. 147-8 (emphasis added). On the link between masculinism and
militarism, see also Diana E.H. Russell's revealingly titled article, "The
Nuclear Mentality: An outgrowth of the Masculine Mentality," Atlantis,
12: 2 (Spring 1987). She writes (at p. 15): "the very real threat to everyone's
survival posed by nuclear war is not what makes it a feminist issue. Nuclear
war is a feminist issue because the threat of nuclear obliteration is a
consequence of the distorted values, psyches, and institutions that sexist
arrangements have bred ... We mut face the fact that at this point in history
the nuclear mentality and masculine mentality are one and the same. To
rid ourselves of one, we must rid ourselves of the other."

52. Ibid., p. 8. One of the most sophisticated
and extensive treatments of this theme is Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking
(see n. 8 above). Ruddick joins Elshtain in believing that "War is exciting;
women, like men, are prey to the excitements of violence and community
sacrifice it promises" (p. 154). In a powerful passage, she writes: "A
pure maternal peacefulness does not exist; what does exist is far more
complicated: a deep unease with military endeavors not easily disentangled
from patriotic and maternal impulses to applaud, connect, and heal; a history
of caring labor interwoven with the romance of violence and the parochial
self-righteousness on which militarism depends" (p. 156). The link between
"mothering" and peace that she seeks to establish is contingent upon a
non-gender-exclusive definition of the initial term in the equation (p.
40). This nimble move perhaps does not fully answer the most common concern
of her critics, which she addresses at p. 43.

53. Rebecca Grant, "The Quagmire of Gender and International
Security," in Peterson (ed.), Gendered States, p. 84. Emphasis in
original. Cynthia Enloe also points out that "feminist start from the conditions
of women's lives," in The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End
of the Cold War (Berkeley, CA, 1993), p. 65.

54. Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues,
pp. 13, 21.

55. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, p.
13.

56. Ibid., p. 200.

57. Ibid., p. 137.

58. Ibid., p. 169.

59. In Canada between 1972 and 1981, men accounted
for 97.4 per cent of deaths on the job (at a time when women constituted
over 40 per cent of the full-time workforce); and men suffer nearly four
times as many "time-loss injuries" as women. See Employment Injuries
and Occupational Illnesses 1972-1981 (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and
Services, 1984), p. 10; Statistics Canada, Work Injuries 1986-1988,
p. 13.

60. Tetrault in Peterson (ed.), Gendered States,
p. 108. Peterson and Runyan likewise note that, as a result of the migration
of US transnational corporations to maquiladora zones in Mexico,
"Between 1979 and 1983, 35 percent of the workers who lost their jobs because
of plant closings in the United States were women" (Global Gender Issues,
p. 101). This means that 65 per cent, a substantial majority, were men,
but this fact is present only by implication. It is never explored, nor
offered as grounds for normative concern or protest. Elsewhere Peterson
and Runyan point a finger at "men ... [who] are flooding into the informal
economy, usurping some of the income generating activities women, particularly
as heads of households, have traditionally turned to in an effort to feed
themselves and their children" (p. 104). Would the authors view the massive
movement worldwide in the other direction - that is, women moving into
traditionally male-dominated occupational spheres - as a cause for worry,
a "usurping" of "the income generating activities [men], particularly as
heads of households, have traditionally turned to"?

65. Likewise, despite her postmodernist commitments,
Sylvester readily draws upon high mechanistic and rationalist - "masculinist"?
- images and metaphors. Hence her reference to "tools of self-evaluation";
"our toolboxes of knowledge at our sides, we keep up the effort to unravel
the fences ..." Feminist Theory and International Relations, pp.
65, 168.

66. Sylvester's attempt to set masculine privilege
against feminine underprivilege similarly leads her into a glaring logical
fallacy: "[Alexander] George neglects to tell us that the decision maker
is assumed unproblematically to be and, in fact, usually is a 'man,' which
means that 'non-decision-makers' are unproblematically 'not-men'" (Feminist
Theory and International Relations, p. 118, emphasis added). Of course,
it means nothing of the sort, but it neatly elides the fact that most "men"
are not "decision-makers."

70. The New York Times, 22 October 1990,
p. A10. Dilip Hiro also notes, again without apparent irony, that "It was
only after Saddam Hussein had ... extended the [hostage] exemption to all
women and children among the Western and Japanese hostages ... that the
malign consequences of Iraq's action were considerably reduced." Hiro,
Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (Hammersmith,
1992), p. 158. Most of the male hostages were held for another three months,
until Saddam's decision on 6 December 1990 to release them.

71. Shahid Javed Burki, "International Migration:
Implications for Labor Exporting Countries," The Middle East Journal,
38: 4 (Autumn 1984), p. 668. The overall refugee figures are drawn from
Judith Miller, "Legacy of a Crisis: 5 Million Refugees," The Gazette
(Montreal) (from The New York Times), 6 July 1991, p. B6. The examples
I cite are those apparently related to migrant labour patterns, where one
can expect an uneven gendering of refugee flow; the Kurdish influx to Turkey
and Iran, on the other hand, would likely be differently gendered. Gender
patterning among migrant communities also shifts according to whether or
not dependants join the worker in the field, but one study found that Jordanian
migrant workers, for example, were "male (over 95 per cent)" as of 1984.
Charles B. Keely and Bassam Saket, "Jordanian Migrant Workers in the Arab
Region: A Case Study of consequences for Labor Supplying Countries," The
Middle East Journal, 38: 4 (Autumn 1984), p. 689.

72. In fairness, a fuller exploration of the larger
issue of refugees would have to acknowledge that "the majority of all
refugees worldwide - not just labour refugees - are women. Interestingly,
the majority of all refugee-claimants worldwide are men. Men
are more likely to come forward with refugee claims because they can more
regularly 'demonstrate' persecution; that is, the types of persecution
men face are easier to document within a legal discourse ... This is not
to suggest that the persecutions faced by male refugee-claimants are in
any way trivial or unimportant, but rather than it is equally important
that legal systems often do not recognize, are unable to 'see,' the particular
persecutions faced by women." I am grateful for these comments by
a reader of an earlier version of this article.

73. "Iraqis Slaughter Hundreds of Shiites at Camp,
Exiles Say," Associated Press dispatch in The Globe and Mail (Toronto),
22 February 1994. The campaign against the southern Shias was, of course,
only the continuation of a long-standing campaign, the most brutal manifestations
of which came in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi eviction from Kuwait:
"Those [Shia civilians] who remained in the south were at the mercy of
advancing government troops, who went through neighborhoods summarily executing
hundreds of young men and rounding up thousands of others." Middle East
Watch, Endless Torment: The 1991 Uprising in Iraq and Its Aftermath
(New York, June 1992), pp. 31-2. The brutal suppression of rebellious Iraqi
Kurds in 1988 similarly contained a blatant gender dimension. Middle East
Watch reported instances of "men and boys among the captured villagers
[who] were executed on the spot ... Virtually all of the remaining men
and older boys disappeared at the hands of security agents; the whereabouts
of many tens of thousands of Kurdish males who disappeared in the hands
of Iraqi government forces is unknown," though the organization believes
that "most, if not all, those who disappeared ... were murdered by Iraqi
security forces." Middle East Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, The
Anfal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of Koreme (New York,
Jan. 1993).

74. "Colombia violenta: 75 muertes diarias" [Violent
Colombia: 75 Deaths Daily], El País (Cali), 18 July 1994.
The World Health Organization apparently utilizes older figures which place
Colombia further down the list, but which also explore the gendering of
suicide. "Men in St. Lucia had the highest homicide rate worldwide, with
22.6 men killed for every 100,000 on the Caribbean island. Ecuador and
Puerto Rico followed, with 21.8 men killed per 100,000. For women, the
highest homicide rate was in the Seychelles islands, with 5.5 women slain
per 100,000. Worldwide, the highest suicide rates were in Hungary, where
men committed suicide at the rate of 48.4 per 100,000 and women at a rate
of 14.6." WHO statistics quoted in "Injury Main Cause of Death Among Young,
Report Says," Associated Press dispatch in The Globe and Mail (Toronto),
7 April 1993, p. A7.

75. On the decline in male life expectancy, see
Geoffrey York, "Health Crisis Growing in Russia," The Globe and Mail
(Toronto), 1 September 1994, p. A1. "A typical Russian man now can expect
to die at 59, more than a decade earlier than men in Western countries.
Just two years ago, male life expectancy was 62. The latest decline has
plunged life expectancy in Russia to levels comparable to those in India
and Egypt." Enloe's Morning After ably examines the Eastern European
transformations in chs. 1 and 8, but men remain peripheral to the analysis.
Hence, the Soviet army, guilty of staggering abuses against male conscript
troops, is described as "an inhumane machine devouring the sons of mothers"
(p. 13, emphasis added). It is the concerns and actions of the mothers
that are the focus in this analysis of "sexual politics at the end of the
Cold War."

76. Carlos M. Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution:
National Liberation and Social Transformation in Central America (New
York, 1986), p. 108. The survey was conducted to determine state compensation
for victims' families.

79. In the USA, up to 80 per cent of the homeless
are males, mostly single men. This pattern might well be evident in other
societies, particularly given the tendency to view males as more able to
take care of themselves and thus more prone to be cast onto the street
when family resources are scarce or non-existent. Peter Marin, "Why Are
the Homeless Mainly Single Men?," The Nation, 8 July 1991.

80. Apart from this quoted statement in Feminist
Theory and International Relations (p. 214), Sylvester's only concession
to the real-life phenomenon is a reference (p. 61) to "the very real and
painful condition of bag-lady homelessness, so common in the world's
urban centers" (emphasis added); she provides a footnote directing readers
to "a discussion of how 'women' become homeless in this way and how bag-ladies
are perceived by others" (p. 231, n. 12).

81. The most prominent feminist legal theorist is
Catharine MacKinnon; see her Towards A Feminist Theory of the State,
esp. chs. 12-13. On sexual assault in prisons, see Stephen Donaldson, "The
Rape Crisis Behind Bars," The New York Times, 29 December 1993,
p. A13. Donaldson, who was gang-raped in prison in 1973, notes that "The
catastrophic experience of sexual violence usually extends beyond a single
incident, often becoming a daily assault. Psychologists and rape counsellors
believe that the pent-up rage caused by these assaults can cause victims,
especially if they don't receive psychological treatment, to erupt in violence
once they return to their communities. Some will become rapists, seeking
to 'regain their manhood' through the same violent means by which they
believe it was lost." Donaldson makes "a conservative estimate" of 290,000
males "sexually assaulted behind bars every year [in the United States].
By comparison the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that there are
135,000 rapes of women a year nationwide, though many groups believe the
number is higher."

82. 1998 Note: Several readers have criticized
my use of the phrase cause célèbre to describe the
rape crisis in Bosnia, feeling it trivializes the suffering of victims
and the energies of the feminists who mobilized around the issue. I did
not intend my terminology to be flip or dismissive. The paradigmatic cause
célèbre is probably the Dreyfus case in France, and the
controversy generated by Zola's j'accuse. To continue to refer to
the case as a cause célèbre does not seem to me to
suggest the case was not serious, or that Zola's intervention was not an
important act of conscience and intellectual courage. These qualities did
seem lacking, however, in the commentary of some feminists on the Bosnian
rape issue - notably Catharine MacKinnon and Susan Brownmiller.

83. Adam Jones, "Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia,"
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17: 1 (1994), pp. 115-34. This article
devotes extended attention to the gender-specific and gender-selective
war experiences of women and men alike, including the mass rapes of Bosnian
and Croatian women.

84. Madhu Kishwar, "Delhi: Gangster Rule," in Patwant
Singh and Harji Malik (eds.), Punjab: The Fatal Miscalculation (New
Delhi, 1985), pp. 171-8. My thanks to Hamish Telford for bringing this
source to my attention. (1998 Note: there seems to be some question
as to whether Kishwar actually claims the "feminist" label for herself;
but I apply it to her regardless.)